Worn out

Odd sort of day. We went to the shop to do a Saturday shop. Social distancing is falling out of use here, we've had so few cases locally that people have got rather sick of the lockdown. It's not so good as a cluster has shown up in Normandy which isn't too far away, and if it does escape here then we'll only get locked down again...

At the garden centre I got the a pair of replacement hose connectors and matching pair of tap connectors. Our old pair leaked like mad, one tap connector had lost its "O" ring, but the other was fine, but still leaked. Our old house had rubbish water pressure, our new house has pretty high pressure which probably accentuated the problem. Anyhow, I replaced the parts and put fresh PTFE tape on the screw threaded bits just in case, and when it was all reassembled it worked as it should have in the first place.

Annoyingly replacement "O" rings for the tap connector are were more expensive than buying two brand new connectors with their "O" rings in place. It's annoying, but I suspect that the old ones weren't a good fit to start with, the new ones are all the same make and mate with a very positive click and produce a tight seal.

Today my wife and her mother had a go at lime pointing a section of our garden wall. In principle it is very cheap and straight forward to do. Mix one part NHL lime (nasty caustic stuff so be careful with it) and three parts sharp sand, with enough water to make into a putty. Squish into the gaps between the stones, and after a few hours tap it in place with a wire brush removing any surplus. Unlike Portland cement mortar, lime can take several days to cure, though the grade used locally is the stronger form and takes only one day to reach reasonable strength. Several hours later they had pointed about a linear metre of pointing and were exhausted...!

In the afternoon I started working on a talk that I will give via a video conference to the Portsmouth Linux Users Group sometime soon. After working on the talk we took the dog for a long walk, which mostly consisted of a sniff - he is very interested in thing in the grass and can occupy himself for hours sniffing here and there with the occasional bout of digging. He lives in a world of odours.

Today's back blip is a rather bedraggled ox-eye daisy, they are coming to the end and with all the heavy rain and wind we have had they all look rather worse for wear - but if they set seed then that's okay with me.